Jim Six: Playing in the street

A neighborhood — a development, maybe? — in Florida has banned kids from playing in the streets.

Advanced Management, the company that manages the Miramar neighborhood in Lakewood Ranch, Fla., prohibits children from playing on the one and only road that passes through the subdivision with 172 residences. A family-oriented neighborhood, is what I read.

Naturally, children are against this rule. One 15-year-old says he wants to be tossing a football around outside, not indoors, playing video games.

Some homeowner — story doesn’t say whether he has kids, but what do you think? — says kids need to have a place to play, but the street isn’t it.

I have to say, kids are pretty hip about playing in the street.

In my neighborhood — not a development, a real neighborhood — we played on my street. It was a one-way residential street with parking on one side of the street only. We knew to look for on-coming cars and generally knew not to play too close to the corner. We’d move pretty quick, we’d drag toys or sports equipment out of the way and just go back to what we were doing when the car came.

We even played in the intersection at one end of that street, but not at the other end. It all had to do with common sense.

Around the corner, the parallel street was more of a through-traffic street. I can’t remember ever seeing anyone playing in that street.

Nobody told us we couldn’t. We were smart enough to know not to.

We were always on the lookout for cars. Someone would yell “Car!” and we’d quickly move out of the way. (Well, sometimes we didn’t move quickly, but that was rare.)

We learned to be clever by playing in the street. When I was a kid, street hockey had not yet become a thing. So we made hockey sticks by nailing two pieces of wood together. A puck was a square of one-inch-thick wood. We didn’t make goal nets — we just used the manhole covers as goals. The puck had to pass over the cover to score. When kids had a few bucks, we’d buy a real ice hockey stick and wrap a ton of electrical or duct tape around the blade to protect the wood from the asphalt.